


Daybreak

by Mad_Max



Series: Les 400 Coups [2]
Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types, Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: attempts at canon era dialogue, excessive use of the word gamin, flâneur references, ranting to statues, too many bad historical references
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-17
Updated: 2013-08-17
Packaged: 2017-12-23 20:23:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,728
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/930747
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mad_Max/pseuds/Mad_Max
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The morning of Lamarque's funeral finds Grantaire wandering the streets of Paris, desperate to avoid his friends and anything even remotely political in nature, but fate has other plans.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Daybreak

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Rueing](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=Rueing).



> I know so little about Paris in 1832, I really kept the scenery to a bare-minimum sorry!  
> This fic is dedicated to Rueing on tumblr. Follow her! She's amazing.

To be a creature of the night, to live in darkness, to walk only in shadow, one has to be empty. A hollow body drifting, soulless and without purpose, through the streets. The empty body swallows light, devours it, compresses it, crushes it and tosses it out again, a mere pinprick where had been a star. A nothing left to glimmer weakly in the sludge.

 

Grantaire had been hard at work all evening and night on the attempt to drink himself into such a state of emptiness. To succumb to the dark, to the night. To sleep. He began with wine at the Musain. A bottle between a discourse on the subject of human nature and a legal sermon from Bossuet; a second in the corner, sullen and alone and praying no one would come to disturb his solitude and hoping they would. No one came - worse - despite his best efforts, the endeavour had been in vain. He had left the Musain as bitter and lost and full as he had entered it.

 

Evening greeted night with the clink of a bottle against the rim of a glass. By midnight, the glass had become superfluous. He progressed from slouching, splay-legged at his desk to hunching at the window, a half-empty bottle dangling between index and middle finger, a scowl twisting his lips into a wine-rouged knot above his wrinkled chin.

 

His mind raged, but his limbs fell slack, lamed. He slouched. He gulped down the faint comings and goings on the street below his window as the drowning man gulps his last mouthful before succumbing to the sea. The edges of his jagged fingernails scraped crooked shapes into the dust on the windowpane. His mind raged. His shoulders dropped. His skin itched, stretched taut across his bones. He blinked against the dryness of his eyes. Swallowed against the dryness in his throat. He drank.

 

Somewhere between three and four, he realised that it was pointless. There was no peace to be found in the bottle tonight. That would have been too easy. Laughably so. Had he really expected to be able to blot out the reality of this night with the basest of vices?

 

Shaking his head, Grantaire finished off what had been left of his drink and reached for the necktie he had discarded beside the desk. Pallid and disheveled as he was, this final stab at decency seemed ridiculous to him, and that was enough to draw a thin smile from his lips as he knotted the thing.

 

He had to pause at the door to consider the unopened bottle in his hand.

 

Again on the front step - drinkless - to bemoan the fact that he had left his key on the desk and would need to engage the help of his portress to regain entrance upon his return.

 

His portress might murder him. _The fifth time this month, M. Grantaire_! she would croak in that worn-out old rag of a voice he had become accustomed to hearing through the crack beneath his door. _This cannot continue! I am an old woman; this will be the death of me. Not that he cares! What would he care? He is young. This world belongs to youth - that’s what all the young ones think these days_. Her mutters would follow him like a shadow each afternoon upon leaving and each night upon returning.

 

 _Young_ , she was often fond of calling him. He chewed on this word as his shoes led him down the street, through a puddle and over another. His youth. Had he ever possessed of a youth? Surely, at some point, as a pudgy-cheeked child in the crook of his mother’s arm, tugging at the skirts of his favourite sister Plaisance as she scolded him in her gentle way for the state of his muddied boots. As a bright-eyed schoolboy with ink stains marring the pale skin of his middle and index fingers, blowing on the rising welts across his palms as the schoolmaster retreated with his cane and his glower. Tracing over prints of St Ursula with his stubby fingers. Stuffing sweets into his mouth when he was certain no one was looking.

 

The images accosted him as through a looking glass, as distant and foreign as though they had never belonged to him, as though he had read about them in a book on someone else’s life.

 

He jammed his hands into his pockets and crossed the street too briskly to have been sauntering, too clumsily to give him an air of purpose. What purpose was there in these twilight outings that had become a habit of late? The purpose of not being at home. The purpose of seeing the city, he told himself, and that contented him.

 

The city of Paris had of late become brother, comrade, sister, father, mother, friend and lover to Grantaire. At least, between the hours of three in the morning and twelve in the afternoon. Before he stumbled back to his little flat near the Musain, or into one of the cafés he frequented, to harass his friends and the serving girls and attempt to drink himself into such a stupour so as not to have to go out wandering all over again.

 

In the soft light of early morning, he ambled down the emptiest and quietest of streets like a clot through a vein, clogging up the promenade, eyes scouring the buildings on either side with a desperation that set him aside from the other young men prone to wandering the city in this fashion; Grantaire’s was the defeated shuffle of the Napoleonic soldier on his way back out of Russia. He carried with him an air of weariness, a complete and utter exhaustion with the world that curved his spine and shoulders and festered in the shadows beneath his eyes.

 

He did not survey the shops to his left or his right; he grasped at them with his gaze, caressed them with his eyes, his fingers twitching from within the confines of his pockets as though longing to reach out and snatch up this piece of the city for himself. Something to take back to his rooms with him, to covet in the lonely hours between midnight and daybreak when his thoughts cycled in vicious spirals through the confines of a skull that felt far too thick beneath the pressure they applied to it.

 

It began to rain. He could not be sure of the hour. The sky had faded to a smudged grey, but he hardly noticed, dragging his feet through the puddles, kicking at the loose edges of paving stones as he loped from street to street in lazy circles.

 

He circled the Luxemboug twice, ears dulled to the twittering of birds as they awoke, eyes unseeing as the odd passerby sprang from his path with a leer and a wide-eyed sideways glance. What Grantaire saw were dew drops on the grass, glistening, as fine as pearls; frost that lay like a paste across the paving stones in the early morning chill. Before he knew it, winter would return. Another seemingly endless expanse of grey months and greyer moods. He watched with vague interest the passing of a _gamin_ , a bright-eyed boy in a ragged shirt several sizes too large, who whistled cheerfully as he strolled along and returned the calls of the birds with greetings and nonsense songs of his own design.

 

Children were fortunate, he could not help but think. Such children especially. They roamed in absolute freedom, thought what they liked, did as they pleased, needed everything and wanted for nothing. They would die as unmissed and unnoticed as he would, but they enjoyed themselves first. They, unlike he, wandered to wander, not to flee.

 

On this last, lugubrious note, he decided to abandon the left bank - and the dangerously close proximity to the Musain - and cross the Seine.

 

Mid-way across the Pont Neuf, Grantaire began to regret his decision to venture any further from home. The brief spurt of rain had all but soaked through his clothes, his hair clinging to the sides of his face and down the back of his neck in sopping tendrils that dripped a consistent stream of water into his eyes and mouth. Because he had already come this far, however, and because he was determined to care about nothing at this point, he ignored it and picked his way across the bridge as quickly as his flooded shoes would allow, pausing at the statue of Henry IV to shake his head.

 

“I must be feverish,” he mumbled, frowning up at the stern face, at the grace of the man astride his bronze horse. “I think I feel myself almost a Republican looking at you, perched on your horse while the majority of us are limited to crossing this bridge as quickly as the human foot allows. And in the rain, no less! Well, my friend, your days here are numbered. You mean to have your peace, but what you shall get is ‘92 all over again. Melted down and recommissioned as a liberty bell or some nonsense - you’ll see. It is nearing daybreak, on funeral day, and the city will arise. An angry handful, at least. They’ll be ringing the tocsin throughout all of Paris - gunpowder and cannonade, the gates thrown open to welcome Kleisthenes and the seven hundred - all on foot, mind you - and it shall amount to nothing, but they may even progress so far as to melt you. I don’t know if that pleases me, or if I find it abhorrent. Perhaps I don’t care either way. In any way, it won’t matter. Even if they do achieve something, they’ll be knocked down again by the next wave of Bourbons, and you’ll go back from Bell to Bridgekeeper. That pleases you, I can see it. Lemot does the Parisian _piéton_ a disservice with his work. One is disappointed. One might have expected better from a man who came to Paris on foot in his youth. It is true; money speaks to the soul in ways no Bible can. That, your highness, is humanity in a nutshell, of which you, despite your very best efforts to the contrary, are just as much a part as the _gamin_ who sleeps at your feet.”

 

He gestured abruptly at what appeared to be a breathing pile of rags propped up against gate guarding the statue’s base.

 

“But you see how well the monarchy works for France - the beggar asks for nothing that he can’t find for himself, and the king, in turn, offers nothing. On this morning, I think it’s the _gamin_ who comes out better. He, at least, shall die and be replaced by another of his kind well before the rain can turn him green.”

 

Having met the purpose of his impromptu monologue - whatever it may have been - Grantaire took off again. This brief encounter with a king, apart from leaving him with the vague fear that his sanity had been washed away in the rain, imbibed him with a renewed vigour, a thirst for exploration. He would see the entire city before he dared return to his apartment. Every shop. Every café. Every restaurant.

 

His friends might be content to barricade themselves up in the nooks and crannies of some dismal little street - if that was what they wanted, they could have it. He wanted no part in it. His plan read something along the lines of: distract self for as long as necessary so as to hopefully avoid everything. He launched a particularly vicious kick at an uneven paving stone and had to swallow the yelp that threatened to wrench itself from his throat as his big toe exploded in pain.

 

If they died, it was no problem of his. None at all; he would stay away until everything had settled down again and then decide how to proceed from there. Return to the survivors, live on, or find new friends - did it matter?

 

He wanted desperately to believe that it did not.

 

It did.

 

It mattered all the way down the Rue de la Monnaie, and into the Rue des Prouvaires, through puddles and mud and unswept horse manure, left onto the Rue St. Honoré, past the Jardin du Palais Royal, sloping up into the Rue de Richelieu. He regarded nothing and stepped in everything. It mattered.

 

Broad daylight had somehow managed to sneak up on him between the bridge and the library before which he currently found himself, his feet planted firmly in the gutter, hands in his pockets, cap sliding down the slick skin of his forehead. Too early to go in. And even if it hadn’t been - with what purpose? The purpose of avoiding another summer shower, perhaps. In order to stay off the streets. In order to distract himself.

 

He hated libraries. He hated purposes even more.

 

He did not go in.

 

What he did do, however, was retrace the steps that had lead him to the library from the Jardin du Palais Royal. It was too early for merrymaking, but Grantaire had no desire to be merry. To drink. To forget. To sleep - perchance to dream; he bit back the bitter edges of the smile that accompanied those thoughts and leapt from the promenade.

 

"Do watch where you - ah, but it is you, Grantaire!"

 

The voice was soft, high and delicate; it complemented the nose with its gentle upward slope and smattering of freckles, the plump, red lips and doe eyes of she to whom they belonged.

 

"You are in a hurry," said she, laying a hand on the crook of his arm with an air of cautious familiarity that did not escape his notice. "I shouldn't keep you."

 

"I'm in no hurry."

 

"In that case," she smiled, and he gulped against the rapid descent of his heart into his pelvis. "You must walk me to the omnibus so that I can share with you my good news. You shall never believe when you hear it - oh, but you are damp. Were you out in the rain this morning?"

 

He allowed her to slide her arm through his and lead them both down the opposite end of the street.

 

"You shall catch cold," she scolded.

 

"With the sun itself draped across my arm?" He shook his head. "I shouldn't think so."

 

"You are a terrible flirt. It doesn't wonder me any that Irma Boissy has turned you down so many times."

 

A pause.

 

"Speaking of Irma Boissy," said she.

 

"We weren't. Or rather, we shouldn't," interrupted Grantaire quickly.

 

"Speaking of Irma Boissy, she is an absolute angel on Earth. You'll never believe where I've been all night!"

 

Grantaire hummed, sidestepping a pile of manure as she tugged at his sleeve.

 

"All right, don't ask me. I don't need any invitations - "

 

"Spring follows winter whether one asks it to or not."

 

"Do stop talking nonsense so that I may finish." It took him a moment to realise that she had stopped walking and was beaming at him from the middle of the street.

 

"You requested an escort to the omnibus," he reminded, wincing at the harsh edge the words took on in his mouth.

 

She waved him off, her hands clasping across her breast, and smiled in a splay of pure ecstasy that sent a bolt of fear down his spine.

 

"My dear Floréal - " he began, but she stepped closer and cut him off almost immediately:

 

"You know that's not my name, and it's hardly an appropriate nickname, on a public street, at this hour."

 

He sighed.

 

"My news," she repeated. "Or, shall we title this volume: _The Reason I Shall Forever Be Indebted to Irma Boissy, for As Long As I Live_ \- did you know that she is the mistress of a banker?"

 

"Yes." Only all too well.

 

"Well, as it turns out, he is one of an entire gaggle of lonely bankers in the city. I've just spent the night with an acquaintance of his - a M'sieur de-Something-or-other who is waiting on pins and needles to take me out to lunch today. He's as plain as you are, which is good for me; he's so thrilled with his luck, he'll be as faithful as a nun."

 

Perhaps if he spoke loudly enough, it would drown out the churning of his stomach.

 

“You err - an ugly man is five times as likely to betray your trust, if only to prove to himself that he is at least attractive enough to be capable of it.”

 

Her shrill laugh sent shivers down his spine, but Grantaire was in throes of recovering from the blow her "news" had delivered; he sidestepped, taking her arm just as she volleyed the expected: "You speak, of course, from experience."  

 

"I do," he responded briskly, "And I tell you, turn tail and run while you still can, or you'll find yourself - "

 

"Here we are!"

 

Forced cheer and a smile that did not meet the hard gleam in her eyes; such were the ways of women as he knew them. A reaction they seemed to have almost instinctively in his presence.

 

Of course, he scoffed after they had said their goodbyes and parted ways, she would rather avoid the truth. No one liked to hear the truth, but was he wrong for wanting to spare her imminent heartbreak? Had he not a right to speak his mind when she - cold, calculating creature that she was - had turned on every charm to lure him into lending her his company and services long enough for her to boast to him of her good fortune? Good fortune, indeed! What she considered good fortune, he called a trip.

 

She would stumble over her banker and his ego soon enough. He had tried to prevent it, to give her a means by which to catch her fall, but she had wanted none of it. So much the worse for her, he decided, lifting his cap to scratch at the crown of his head. She would see. Happy endings were the stuff of children's stories. Legends. The only happy ending was of the quick and painless variety. All else repulsed him - to die of heartbreak, of hunger, of a bayonet wound on a barricade - he shivered.

 

Floréal, Grantaire reasoned, deserved only his pity. She and his friends. They who deigned to pity him were the truly sad, lost souls. He may have been unhappy, ugly, an unwilling bachelor; perhaps he had not slept; there were worse things. At least he could rely on the certainty of breakfast the following morning. Alive, heart intact. Oh, but he did pity them, those fools. Floréal, Enjolras - their eyes fixed firmly on an ideal of the future - would not have seen the low clouds like smudges of charcoal in the sky overhead, would not have felt the seep of rainwater through their pores, have seen the cemetery as he did now; that great, looming expanse, like a black hole stretching its jaws in their wake.

 

Grantaire saw the cemetery. Hurried past it, eyes downcast. He saw the lamps that seemed to mock him from shop windows, a reminder of the clouds overhead, of the fog in his own mind, of the stars he had consumed, compressed, chewed up and spit out as faint glimmers of dying matter into the sludge on the street. All that great lack of light, an entire world of night without sleep. A lifetime fumbling in the dark.

 

He thought of Floréal and her banker and her bright future, of Enjolras and the fire in his words.

 

"All others live among the stars, and here I am in the mud, with nought but a broken telescope and a lantern without a wick," he muttered to himself, cutting another corner so as to avoid the boulevard beyond.

 

His feet had taken him to a familiar little side street entirely of their own accord. Up to this point, Grantaire had done his best to avoid his usual haunts, but it seemed to him that God - or whoever - had other plans. The Corinthe, at least, appeared empty from his current position  on the street outside.

 

There was no one but fat, bustling Madame Hucheloup to greet him as he entered, no burst of warm laughter or snatches of an impassioned speech, not the chink of dominoes, nor the clink of glasses to signal danger. Cautiously, as though afraid the floor might give in at any given moment, he crossed the threshold, the door swinging shut behind him.

 

“Your friends are upstairs,” said Madame Hucheloup without looking up from the glasses she was polishing. His stomach sank. “They have ordered without you. Oysters. It’s not the season for oysters, I say, but they asked for oysters; I have a hamper left over from last month.” She shrugged at him as he neared the stairs, her thick eyebrows raised. “Who am I to deny a guest his oysters if I have them?”

 

If he turned on his heel now, walked to the door, opened it, crossed the threshold, entered the street, careened into another side-street and galloped away as quickly as his tired feet could carry him, he might still be able to save this situation. To return home, to traipse into the library, to find the cheapest and dingiest public house and drink himself into oblivion - all more attractive options than the one he was faced with now. Walk up the stairs. Announce himself. Breakfast with the damned.

 

Now that he was already here, he could not imagine leaving and could not stand the idea of staying.

 

He climbed the steps half-way, turned as though to descend once more, shook his head, exhaled sharply.

 

Joly’s familiar laugh drifted into the stairwell, followed by a cough and the scrape of a heavy plate across the scrubbed wood of a table.

 

A match well-played by fate.

 

His breath laboured, Grantaire leant against the wall of the stairwell. Ran a hand through his hair, crumpled his cap with the other. Check-mate.

 

Oh, but he had been a fool to think that he could outwit life itself.

 

Resigned, he cleared his throat, steeling himself, and began the ascent anew, taking care to conceal the cracks in his voice as he announced:

 

"I am passing by. I smell from the street a delicious odor of Brie cheese. I enter."

 


End file.
